Sunday, January 07, 2007

workers unite - lets garden!

Channel surfing as a kid I'd often stick between stations and watch static like that girl from poltergeist but instead of seeing the ghosts or whatever I imagined the antenna was picking up TV shows from Soviet Russia. I would swear to you that I could see shots of farmers ploughing wide fields extolling their virtue through manual labour and while most likely the combination of sensory deprivation and an overactive yet geopolitically attuned imagination, I'd convinced myself that a chain of extraordinary events, a pigeon shitting on our aerial perhaps, a freakish meteorological electrical storm or some frighteningly superior soviet transmitting technology had allowed my family to watch, grainy and without sound albeit, a Communist gardening show from the far flung USSR.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

acid tears

I've been seriously thinking of trashing this blog, deleting it. I had contemplated it. Put plans together and thought about what would be my farewell speech etcetera but here it stands and I am still trying to force blood from stone. Well things have been pretty dark of late; I'd be hard pressed to deny it. I've been self medicating, drinking mainly to feel normal and hell I even turned up the other week to a doctor's appointment drunk. And then there's been the mood swings and fits of uncontrollable crying while reading, watching tv, holding back tears while in queue at the checkout, dread and panic at the thought of leaving the house and then the same fears about returning there.

I took an e on the weekend, sunday night, new years eve and then I took another one a few hours later. Sure I make no sense, I babble, make noise just to fill the spaces but I feel alright yeah, well to do and well adjusted... relatively of course, the special kind. The electrical storm dissipates leaving the quiet, the oh so quiet that I can hear the old man in the room next playing solitaire. Well that and the screaming vocals of Martin Sorrondeguy from Limp Wrist, the queercore band I was seeing at the Arthouse with friends Josh and Richard. I can say of all the drugs I've ever tried MDMA has been my favourite. Yes most certainly.

Now cut to the morning, 7am as I am walking home from the house party Josh and I had ended up at after the gig having left Richard at the Arthouse. The evening had had a very high school feel to it, live music followed by a party at someone-or-other's house, beer and at least one stupid fuck on drugs (me for the less perceptive of you). There was chatting and flirting and confessions all around and neighbours banging on the fence telling us to shut the fuck up and yes again, I am walking home, still buzzing, left by the others zooming off in their cabs to the other sides of town, when my left eye began to cry. I stopped in the street as it began to burn: my tears were burning my eye, squinting, rubbing my eye with my sleave wiping it hoping the tears would stop. A sign perhaps. Of what? I don't know. Difficult things these signs and portents.

I went to the doctor yesterday. The results of a breakdown of sorts and an intervention staged by a good friend who'd been there on the phone when it'd happened. After a forty or so minute session with the shrink I was prescribed a drug known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of antidepressants that increase the available serotonin levels in the brain or something and funnily enough is chemically similar to MDMA, my bestest buddy e.